Maybe We Should 'End The Internet As We Know It'

The Senate is expected to confirm FCC chairman Ajit Pai today despite opposition from advocacy groups who want to retain the Obama Administration’s net neutrality rules. These groups are opposing Pai’s efforts to revamp U.S. internet policy because they fear change “will end the Internet as we know it.”

The Obama Administration watched the internet burn these democratic institutions for eight years while heeding net neutrality advocates’ call to focus regulatory attention on internet service providers (ISPs) alone.

Net neutrality advocates worry that ISPs could erect internet “toll booths” while ignoring the 30% toll that Apple charges app developers for the privilege of offering their products and services to consumers who use Apple devices. They worry that ISPs could silence a critical blogger while supporting a law that encourages Google and others to censor legal content without consequence. They worry that ISPs could make it harder for a new social network to reach the market while ignoring the fact that Google and Apple won’t let social network Gab into their app stores.

While net neutrality advocates were busy fretting about ISPs, monopolistic ad platforms have sucked most of the internet’s value from consumers and content creators — and they’ve done it using the same practices that net neutrality advocates denounce. As a result, the internet we know today bears little resemblance to the decentralized communications system envisioned by its creators in the 1960s.

The economics of the internet we’ve come to know are based on “surveillance capitalism,” a “new form of information capitalism that aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control,” says professor Shoshana Zuboff. She argues that it’s no longer reasonable to concern ourselves with the challenges of a narrowly-conceived “information society.” Today’s policymakers must deal with the problems of an “information civilization.”

Democrats’ ISP-focused net neutrality rules are hopelessly ill-suited to such a task. They can’t ensure a free flow of information on the internet. Regulating only ISPs as a means of ensuring information flow is like regulating only a river’s last dam to ensure a free flow of water. Just as any upstream dam can limit the flow of water downstream, any internet intermediary can limit the flow of information to consumers.

As important as it is, the free flow of information is only one of our information civilization’s potential problems — one that introduces problems of its own: it was the very freeness with which information flows on today’s internet that enabled Russia to undermine the last presidential election.

Today’s policy debates haven’t even scratched the surface of surveillance capitalism’s implications for behavior modification and the survival of self determination. How can policymaker’s consider these issues when today’s Democrats won’t even support a fair online privacy bill that’s based on the recommendations of Obama’s Federal Trade Commission?

If Democrats’ opposition to Ajit Pai’s confirmation is about preserving the internet as we know it, they should rethink it. The internet we know is killing the foundational institutions on which democracy depends. We need a new internet, and for that, we need Congressional action, not obstructionism.

I am the director of Tech Knowledge, a Senior Policy Advisor with Wireless 20/20, and an adjunct professor in the Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law program at the Nebraska College of Law. I headed the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau at the Federal Communications Co...